Pakistan and Iran's Dysfunctional Relationship
2009; Middle East Forum; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2767-049X
Autores Tópico(s)Belt and Road Initiative
ResumoPublished in the Spring 2009 Middle East Quarterly, pp. 43-50. In April 2008, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Pakistan as part of a whistlestop tour of South Asia. The meeting was cordial but tense. While the two neighbors were once staunch Cold War allies, the Islamic Revolution, Afghanistan's civil war, and Pakistan's nuclear development have transformed the relationship into one of tense rivalry. As Afghanistan's stability has become a U.S. strategic concern, preventing Pakistan-Iran tensions from again transforming Afghanistan into a proxy battlefield should be a U.S. interest. Unfortunately, so long as the Iranian and Pakistani governments remain concerned with the defense of Shi'i and Sunni sectarian interests respectively, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan may not be able to bring stability but at best may remain referees in a struggle that extends far beyond that country's borders. A Troubled Triangle Pakistan and Iran are bound by cultural, tribal, and religious bonds. Pakistan gained its independence in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Iran became the first state to recognize the new nation, and the two neighbors soon developed a strong partnership, signing a treaty of friendship in 1950. Some of this was geopolitical. Pakistan was born amidst great bloodshed and a transfer of population with India, a country with which Pakistan has territorial disputes to the present day. Pakistan found a natural partner in Iran after the Indian government chose to support Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser who sought to export a pan- Arab ideology that threatened many Arab monarchies, a number of which were favored by the Iranian shah. Iran was a natural ally and model for Pakistan for other reasons as well. Both had majority Muslim populations but remained secular, centralized, and Western-oriented in practice. Both countries granted the other most-favored nation status for trade purposes; the shah offered Iranian oil and gas to Pakistan on generous terms, and the Iranian and Pakistani armies cooperated to suppress the rebel movement in Baluchistan.1 Both countries also became major bulwarks of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Both were firm U.S. allies and members of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1971, however, the geopolitical situation began to shift. The withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf left the United States to fill the vacuum, making Saudi Arabia far more important in U.S. strategic calculus. Pakistan's defeat in its 1971 war with India - and the loss of half its territory with Bangladesh's independence - led it to court China as a means to balance India. Pakistan also sought closer ties with the Arab states in order to isolate India, and thus weakened its ties to Iran, even though Islamabad-Tehran relations remained cordial. The shah's fall in 1979 was a blow to Pakistan. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's antiAmerican posture worried the Pakistani authorities, as did the prospect of any export to Pakistan of Khomeini's radical views. After all, in 1979, perhaps 20 percent of Pakistan's population was Shi'i and, at the same time, Khomeini's religious rhetoric sparked radicalism across the sectarian divide. Nevertheless, Islamabad offered an olive branch to Tehran. Pakistan was among the first countries to recognize the new Islamic Republic and was among very few countries in the region that refrained from supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.2 The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the Soviet Union to Pakistan's doorstep, transforming the geostrategic environment further, all the more so given India's close ties to Moscow. For the United States, concerned about Soviet expansionism, Pakistan's importance rose. Ironically, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States all found themselves on the same side with regard to Afghanistan, even as Iran's revolutionary authorities continued to hold U.S. diplomats hostage. Though Iran was preoccupied with domestic turmoil and its war with Iraq in the 1980s, it supported the Afghan resistance and provided limited financial and military assistance to groups who supported the Iranian vision of revolutionary Islam. …
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